Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights - Softcover

Hartmann, Thom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605095591 ISBN 13: 9781605095592

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

“This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies.” —Paul Hawken, New York Times-bestselling author
 
NEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED 
 
Unequal taxes, unequal accountability for crime, unequal influence, unequal control of the media, unequal access to natural resources—corporations have gained these privileges and more by exploiting their legal status as persons. How did something so illogical and unjust become the law of the land? 
 
Americans have been struggling with the role of corporations since before the birth of the republic. As Thom Hartmann shows, the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest against the British East India Company—the first modern corporation. Unequal Protection tells the astonishing story of how, after decades of sensible limits on corporate power, an offhand, off-the-record comment by a Supreme Court justice led to the Fourteenth Amendment—originally passed to grant basic rights to freed slaves—becoming the justification for granting corporations the same rights as human beings. And Hartmann proposes specific legal remedies that will finally put an end to the bizarre farce of corporate personhood. 
 
This new edition has been thoroughly updated and features Hartmann’s analysis of two recent Supreme Court cases, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits.
 
“If you wonder why and when giant corporations got the power to reign supreme over us, here’s the story.” —Jim Hightower, national radio commentator and New York Times-bestselling author 
 
“Tell[s] the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel. ”—David C. Korten, bestselling author of When Corporations Rule the World

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thom Hartmann is the nation’s leading progressive talk radio host, heard on over a hundred stations, as well as on XM and Sirius radio, and seen on live nationwide television via the Free Speech TV network. He is the bestselling author of eighteen books, including Threshold, Screwed, and Cracking the Code.

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The Battle to Save Democracy

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart.

—Anne Frank, from her diary, July 15, 1944

ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2009, THE TRANSNATIONAL PHARMACEUTICAL GIANT Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people and that definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended.

Because Pfizer is a corporation—a legal abstraction, really—it couldn’t go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillinger; instead it paid a $1.2 billion “criminal” fine to the U.S. government—the biggest in history—as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties. The total settlement was more than $2.3 billion—another record. None of its executives, decision-makers, stockholders/owners, or employees saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell.

Most Americans don’t even know about this huge and massive crime. Nor do they know that the “criminal” never spent a day in jail.

But they do know that in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation.

Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.

In 2009 the right-wing advocacy group Citizens United argued before the Supreme Court that they had the First Amendment right to “free speech” and to influence elections through the production and the distribution of a slasher “documentary” designed to destroy Hillary Clinton’s ability to win the Democratic nomination. (Some political observers assert that they did this in part because they believed that a Black man whose first name sounded like “Osama” and whose middle name was Hussein could never, ever, possibly win against a Republican, no matter how poor a candidate they put up.)

In that, they were following on a 2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States. Nobody ever went to jail for saying, “No, of course you don’t look fat in those pants!”)

Corporations haven’t limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game. (They haven’t yet argued the Third Amendment—you can’t force citizens to quarter soldiers in their homes—although Blackwater’s activities in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina could have provided an interesting test.)

As you’ll learn in this book, in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges. Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.

If this trend continues, it’s probably just a matter of time before a corporation (maybe one of the many mercenary forces that emerged out of George W. Bush’s Iraq War?) claims the Second Amendment right to bear arms anywhere, anytime, and your credit card company’s bill collector shows up at your home with a sidearm.

This legal situation is not only bizarre but also quite the opposite of the vision for this country held by the Founders of the nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).

The American Revolution, you’ll learn in this book, was in fact provoked by the misbehavior of a British corporation; our nation was founded in an anti-corporate-power fury.

Corporate Personhood in the Making

The most significant and oft-quoted precedent to the turning point of corporate power in America began just after the Civil War. It rested on a Constitutional Amendment successfully written and passed by a group of “Radical Republicans” after the Civil War to take slavery out of the Constitution.

Given that today’s Republican Party has—largely since the Robber Baron Era of the 1880s—been the party of big business and the very rich, it’s a bit difficult for some people to get their minds around the possibility that the Republican Party started out as a reform party that for nearly seventy years (from before Abraham Lincoln until just after Theodore Roosevelt left the party to start a third party) had a strong progressive wing. But it did.

Although Lincoln was by today’s standards a “moderate” Republican, he was still anti-slavery, pro–middle class, and pro-labor (he famously said, “Labor is superior to capital because it precedes capital”—nobody was wealthy until somebody made something—and was the first president both to use the word “strike” and to actually stop police and private armies from killing and beating strikers).

And just like in today’s mainstream Democratic Party, where there’s a progressive minority that always seems to be pushing the edges, in the Republican Party of the 1800s there was a very—even by today’s standards—progressive faction.

The Radical Republicans were a splinter group that emerged in a big way from the Republican Party at its founding in 1854; and just after the Civil War, in 1866, they gained a majority among Republicans in the House of Representatives, where they had a powerful influence until the faction disintegrated in the 1870s during the presidency of Republican Ulysses S. Grant. They supported the absolute right of freed slaves to vote and participate in all aspects of government and society, and they pushed hard for the punishment of former Confederates (and Democrats in the South) and fought with the more moderate mainstream Republicans.

After Lincoln’s assassination they had so much power in the House that they were able to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and override President Andrew Johnson’s veto of it (and a dozen other bills). They drove the impeachment of Johnson and missed by a single vote.

They also realized that if they wanted to really free Blacks, it wasn’t enough to just pass a law. They had to get the implicit approval of slavery out of the Constitution itself, so they proposed three Constitutional amendments— what we now call the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605095591
• ISBN 13: 9781605095592
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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